Engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and educators across a diverse range of industries solve engineering and scientific problems requiring large complex models using computer applications that provide technical computing environments. One such technical computing environment is MATLAB®, a product of The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass. The MATLAB® technical computing environment provides both a high performance language and a technical computing application that provides mathematical and graphical tools for mathematical computation, data analysis, visualization and algorithm development. The MATLAB® technical computing environment integrates numerical analysis, matrix computation, signal processing, and graphics in an easy-to-use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation, without traditional programming. The MATLAB® technical computing environment is used to solve complex engineering and scientific problems through model development. A model may be prototyped, tested and analyzed by running the model under multiple boundary conditions, data parameters, or a number of initial guesses.
As a desktop application, MATLAB® allows users to interactively perform complex analysis and modeling in a familiar workstation environment. However, a single workstation or a single execution thread may be limited in their computational power. As problems require larger and more complex modeling, computations become more resource intensive and time-consuming. For example, a simulation of a large complex aircraft model may take an amount of time that is acceptable to a user to run once with a specified set of parameters. However, the analysis of the problem may also require the model be computed multiple times with a different set of parameters, e.g., at one-hundred different altitude levels and fifty different aircraft weights in order to understand the behavior of the model under varied conditions. Thus five-thousand computations may be called for to analyze the problem as desired and the single workstation may take an unreasonable or undesirable amount of time to perform these simulations. Therefore, it may be desirable to perform a computation concurrently using multiple workstations, multiple processor or multiple computation threads. One of skill in the art will appreciate that using multiple computation resources may be advantageous not only in the cases of large computational throughput, but also for testing, usability, user preferences, etc.
Applications providing technical computing environments that are traditionally used as desktop applications, such as MATLAB®, may be modified to be able to utilize the computing power of concurrent computing, such as parallel computing. However, the execution of an application or other processes in a concurrent computing environment may result in the generation of multiple outputs that must be presented to a user. Additionally, the presentation of the multiple outputs may become confusing to a user.